The 24th Discworld novel and the fifth in the Watch theme. The Scone of Stone, an ancient dwarven artifact, has been stolen, and without it, the new Low King of the Dwarfs cannot be crowned. It's up to Sam Vimes and the Ankh-Morpork City Watch to travel to Uberwald and unravel the dark conspiracy surrounding the theft. Also, Vimes fights werewolves.

The Fifth Elephant provides examples of:

Above Good and Evil: A number of the vampires and werewolves hold to this thinking; Vimes sees it as what people firmly under the Evil category would use as an excuse.

Addiction Displacement: Lady Margolotta is a "blood teetotaler" who has transferred her lust for blood to a lust for control/politics. And fine tobacco.

All Animals Are Dogs: Not generally, but werewolves have doglike tendencies that become a plot point. As the book itself puts it, anything part human and part wolf must have some dog in there.

Actual wolves are not very doglike, certainly to the extent that Gaspode's usual street-dog repartee fails him entirely. Gavin non-verbally lampshades this by catching a stick Carrot tosses solely so he can very slowly bite it in half while staring directly at him.

Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Vimes sarcastically finishes his list of titles with the fact that he was a blackboard monitor at school. His assistant mentions that he should hold it in reserve in the event of a tie. But subverted in that the dwarfs, with their belief in the importance of the written word, assume that a responsibility for erasing words must surely only be given to a very trustworthy person indeed.

It also pops up again as a Call Back in Thud! and was given as a real title by Rhys between then and Snuff.

Gavin's biting a thrown stick in half very slowly may qualify as a non-verbal example.

Bamboo Technology: The Clacks, though based on a real system, are inexplicably faster, far cheaper, and vastly more effective than the telegraph was when first introduced on Earth. Given they function as a parody of the Internet, a modern offshoot of the telegraph, this is mostly forgivable.

A reason for their effectiveness is given in passing: Discworld has gargoyles, who are good at sitting around watching things and too uncreative to make many mistakes.

Also, since Discworld has no curvature, unless there are mountains in the way, a signal can travel very far indeed.

Batman Gambit: Vimes attacks Wolf with a flare, expecting his instincts to make him catch it. He acknowledges beforehand that it has a slim chance of working.

The Game-playing werewolves employ this trope to put Sleeps and Skimmer right where they want them.

Berserk Button: Werewolves with certain words, like "bath" and "vet." Becomes awkward when Vimes mentions Lord Vetinari in front of some werewolves.

Betty and Veronica: Hinted at with werewolf Angua, who has run away from her human life with good, dependable Carrot and joined up with a "good friend" Gavin, a true wolf who is implied to be an old flame. She seems undecided as to whether she is going to return to Ankh-Morpork afterwards.

Bond One-Liner: Deliberately averted; Vimes thinks of some in his head after killing Wolfgang and realises that saying any of them would make him nothing more than a cold-hearted murderer.

Book Ends: The novel starts with Gavin the wolf hitching a ride to Ankh-Morpork in the back of a lumber wagon, and ends with Gaspode the Wonder Dog mooching a lift home to Ankh-Morpork on a coal barge.

In the empty clacks tower, Vimes finds a mortar flare and reads the instructions, "Light fuse. Do not place in mouth." He also explains why it is a stupid weapon since it can't be aimed. Both of these come into play at the end of the book.

A Night At The Opera turns out to be important later, although Vimes himself hadn't been paying attention to the plot.

Colony Drop: The titular Fifth Elephant lost its footing on Great A'tuin's shell in prehistory and collided with the Disc, breaking apart its Pangaea-type supercontinent and being responsible for Uberwald's fat reserves.

That's the legend about it, anyway. There's another suggestion that the fat reserves are from a large number of megafauna (big animals) in the region that died suddenly and were miraculously preserved, in kind of a riff off of how people think of oil as "dead dinosaurs." The discussions of the importance of Uberwaldian fat to Ankh-Morpork's industries and modern living resembles discussions of how important oil is to the real world.

Covers Always Lie: Despite the enraged plummeting pachyderm on the cover of some editions, to say nothing of the title, the book is not actually about an elephant. Well, it is about an elephant, but a metaphorical, not literal, one. Okay, okay, there is a literal elephant, but it's a legend of something that may or may not have happened millions of years ago.

The blurb on the back cover of one of the editions is also extremely misleading, with statements like "It's up to the dauntless Vimes ... to solve the puzzle of the missing pachyderm" (that's not the crime he's solving at all, the fifth elephant is merely a legend, and is also a Uberwaldian phrase meaning "something that is not what it seems", but the back cover makes it sound like Vimes is actively looking for the literal fifth elephant).

Danger Takes a Backseat: Wolfgang's pack are fond of a low-tech variant, waiting under a tarp in a rowboat for an unsuspecting quarry to climb aboard.

Death of the Hypotenuse: Gavin. Vimes's inner cynic can't help but notice this, even though he'll never say it to Carrot's face.

Determinator: Vimes knows Wolfgang isn't finished due to these tendencies. He makes a short speech to Sybil comparing him to the men in Ankh-Morpork who will charge into insurmountable odds and won't give up until they're dead. One of the few times in the series that Vimes doesn't understand the irony of his and other people's statements.

Digging to China: Viewing the candle-dotted dwarf city far beneath Bonk for the first time, a flabbergasted Vimes murmurs that they've gone down too deep, presumably emerging on the underside of the Disc.

Does This Remind You of Anything?: The geopolitical plot, with shattered Uberwald harboring rich fat reserves needed to make candles for Ankh-Morpork, is a parody of central and eastern Europe's dependency on oil and gas from Russia — right down to the metaphor of "the lights go off." However, the "traditional" dwarfs who find femininity sinful and demand it be hidden, wear shrouding robes, "prefer" their own laws over the law of a country they live in and possess fossil fuel can also make one think of various Muslim cultures.

On a less serious note, mention is made of some people using the new communication system in crowded public places, to the annoyance of people in their general vicinity. Now are we talking about the clacks, or cell phones?

Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Although Überwald was already Hammer-Horror-Transylvania, here it is expanded to take in Ruritania and the former Soviet Union — mention is made of the now defunct "Unholy Empire", a neat combination of the USSR and Holy Roman Empire.

Fluffy the Terrible: Gavin the wolf, so called because he once ate someone called Gavin. Well, parts of him.

Also, when Angua and Wolf fight, it's noted that they have to suppress their own lupine sides while doing so, to avoid mistakes. A cat pouncing on a fizzing fuse because it's moving is an example of the impulses they need to resist.

Another one: At one point Vimes was reminded of some philosophical bastard who once stated that 'a government needed butchers as well as shepherds'. We found out who said that in Night Watch.

Fun with Acronyms: BCBs, or "Burnt Crunchy Bits," are impurities in the fat — possibly a Shout-Out to PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl) a persistent organic pollutant that is, fittingly, highly soluble in fat.

Also, Leonard of Quirm as usual can't come up with snappy names for his inventions - after he invents a clacks code machine for the Patrician, he contemplates it the "Engine for the Neutralisation of Information by the Generation of Miasmic Alphabets" (but says it doesn't roll off the tongue, failing to notice the acronym), a sly cryptography Shout-Out.

Fun with Foreign Languages: Vimes can't quite speak dwarfish, introducing himself as "Overseer Vimes of the Look" and inadvertently using a form of the word 'dwarf' that indicates miscreant (which, as a policeman, is no doubt the term he used most often in street dwarfish).

The setup for the whole plot is a major cultural schism between, broadly, the conservative mining dwarfs and the progressive city-dwelling ones.

Angua angrily compares the hunts her brother stages with the ones her father staged, where the hunted man had an honest chance, and got a big bag of money and a banquet at the castle if he won. Deconstructed with Carrot's response that the men still died. (He was trying to not be nice for once. Turns out he's good at it.)

A Lampshade Hanging in that Vimes correctly predicted the final form as soon as the story got started.

Groin Attack: Backfires on the Bonk guardsman who kicked Detritus in the rocks and wound up walking with a limp. Also see Mexican Standoff, below.

Half-Human Hybrid: There's a little discussion about the technicalities of werewolves interbreeding with both humans and wolves. They can't change, but depending on the non-werewolf parent they come out either as particularly clever wolves or hairy and boisterous humans.

A few of them still involuntarily change to a wolf-man form (from either base shape) at full moon, and a few of these appeared in earlier books.

He's Got a Weapon!: Averted by Sam Vimes. When he is imprisoned by the dwarves, someone smuggles a single-shot crossbow into his cell. Vimes notes that if you want to help someone escape, you send them a key - sending someone a weapon will only get them killed via this trope, which is exactly what the sender had in mind.

Howl of Sorrow: Gaspode starts a mourning howl, which is passed on into the night by unseen wolf packs.

Given how small and mongrelly Gaspode is, this is something of an achievement.

Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: A tradition in Uberwald, where a peasant could legitimately win by outrunning the werewolf chasing him, gaining a substantial payoff... at least until Wolfgang took it over. He doesn't play fair.

The name is less fitting here since in Überwald, you can hardly call humans the most dangerous things you could hunt, and werewolves are barely at any risk at all in so doing.

Idiot Ball: Carrot tries to use Good Old Fisticuffs against the Axe Crazy Wolf. Vimes berates him for it after. Amusingly, his wolfish love rival apparently attempts the wolf-equivalent moments later, to similar derision from Gaspode.

Intellectual Animal: Gavin is a lot smarter than he looks. He's also one of the only characters in the entire series who appears to be immune to Carrot. In fact, based on the fact that he can keep the wolves from killing Angua, he may even be their equivalent to Carrot.

Interspecies Romance: It's implied that werewolf Angua and the ordinary wolf Gavin (for the given value of "ordinary") were once romantically involved, despite the oft-repeated point that werewolves and wolves are entirely different species. For that matter, Carrot (human/really tall dwarf) and Angua (werewolf) also count. Angua even compares Gavin and Carrot to each other by their admirable qualities.

Just Following Orders: Played straight and subverted. This is Tantony's excuse to Vimes after he let Sybil go with Serafine. Immediately and ruthlessly subverted upon when Vimes, in order to make a point to Tantony, orders Detritus to shoot him and Detritus tells him to shove it.

Just Toying with Them: Wolf and his cronies like to play with their food. As Angua points out, not even Vimes would have stood a chance if they'd just rushed him at once. Instead, they gave him a "lead" and kept harassing him one at a time (neither side knew he had reinforcements coming).

Late to the Punchline: The narration notes this when Vimes is trying to explain what a "bottle covey" is to Sybil.

"Any normal person, they crawl off when they get a beating. Or they have the sense to stay down, at least. But sometimes you get one who just won't let go. You know what I mean? Idiots who'll go on fighting long after they should stop."

"I think I know the type, yes," said Lady Sybil, with an irony that failed to register with Sam Vimes until some days later.

Mister Muffykins: Margolotta owns one of these, although possibly it's as part of her ManipulativeBitch in Sheep's Clothing deception, not because of any actual inclination towards small yappy dogs. However, it's strongly hinted that it might not actually be a dog at all.

Monsters Anonymous: Lady Margolotta is a member of a support group for vampires who don't drink blood.

Noble Shoplifter: Carrot insists on leaving money behind when he takes food from isolated farmhouses whilst trailing a werewolf pack into the mountains.

Just like Angua always pays for the chickens she kills under the full moon (because an animal wouldn't).

Nothing Up My Sleeve: Inigo Skimmer has a specially designed palm dagger which allows him to remove people's heads with nothing more than a karate chop. Being a Crazy-Prepared assassin, he also has little blades that come out of his shoes, a razor-edged hat, and an illegal spring-gonne. None of which saves him in the end.

Not So Different: After Wolfgang's disappearance, Vimes explains to Sybil why he keeps his guard up by describing Wolfgang as "bottle covey" - someone who does not quit no matter how soundly he has been trounced. Sybil remarks that it sounds like someone she knows well.

Skimmer tries this, but is too clever for his own good. At one point Vimes throws him an orange, and Skimmer lets it bounce off of him. At this point, Vimes knows that he is a professional, since an ordinary person would have either tried to catch it or at least flinched.

Skimmer also advises Vimes that this is a good trait in a diplomat.

Lady Margolotta is a more successful example, seeming pretty harmless for someone who knows Vetinari and apparently picked up a few things from him.

Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: The emergency signal flare rockets for the clacks tower have the warning "Do Not Place In Mouth". This turns out to foreshadow how Vimes kills Wolfgang (a werewolf that can only be killed by fire or silver): he tricks him into catching one of the rockets in his mouth before the flare goes off.

Partial Transformation: Unlike the way the trope usually works, werewolves mid-transformation are momentarily disoriented and the worst of both forms. He uses this to kil- defeat a couple of them in close combat. Wolfgang gets stuck halfway between wolf and man at the end, and is pretty fearsome.

Plot Armor: Vimes reflects that Carrot may have this in-universe, thanks to his royal destiny.

Pregnant Hostage: Done somewhat differently when the diplomatic carriage carrying the Ankh Morpork delegation to Bonk is ambushed by bandits in the pass. Sybil is briefly held hostage as a bargaining chip, but at this point, Sam Vimes has no idea that Sybil is pregnant, and frankly, Sybil is a bit of a Pregnant Badass about it, keeping her calm and ducking so her husband can shoot the bandit holding her, with a weapon she doesn't even know he has. She's actually trying (not for the first time) to get his attention long enough to gently break the news to him just before the ambush.

Inigo was a scholarship boy, meaning it was effectively his only way out of poverty. Vimes knows full well how difficult it is to escape from that kind of background, and tends to judge those who have done so more leniently, with the important caveat that they do so without harming any innocents. Inigo works for Vetinari - the embodiment of Lawful Neutral, and is only ever shown killing in self-defence, or in defence of those he was ordered to protect.

Saving The World With Art: Lady Sybil sings the "Ransom" aria from the great dwarf opera Bloodaxe and Ironhammer, charming every dwarf in Bonk and convincing them to let her husband deliver the Scone to the Low King in person. This not only allows Vimes to clear his own name, but averts a terrible underground war that would've torn dwarf society apart.

Servile Snarker: Skimmer, after a while. Vimes commends him on dropping his original deferential attitude.

Shapeshifter Mode Lock: Apparently quite common in werewolves — Angua had a human-shaped sister and a wolf-shaped brother. Wolfgang killed the former and chased off the latter.

Shapeshifter Swan Song: Downplayed — when Wolfgang comes back the last time, he seems to be having trouble controlling his transformations, and is wobbling around the halfway point between man and wolf.

A wad of thick ones to Anton Chekhov. The women who equip Vimes against the werewolves are a mash-up of references to Chekhov's works: they're Three Sisters, who are stuck in an old house with a Cherry Orchard and used to have an old Uncle named Vanya. Their specific characterisations are also a mash-up of Chekhov's female characters from those books.

Colon's frantic obsession with "missing" sugar is a shout out to the captain's obsession with strawberries in The Caine Mutiny.

Shrouded in Myth: The titular Fifth Elephant; the Scone of Stone. Even several of the political figures of Uberwald.

Smarter Than You Look: Cheery is showing shades of this. She's always been a good alchemist; now she's showing she's a good copper.

Steam Punk: Though lacking actual steam engines, the Clacks in this book begins a trend of driving Ankh-Morpork from Medieval Stasis over to this setting.

Also, the traffic control subplot carried over from the previous Watch book. The traffic security came— I mean, imps, for example.

Stop or I Will Shoot!: Very consciously averted. Vimes makes it a point to do it by the book and spell it out crystal clear to a perp he's in hot pursuit of: He is armed, and will respond with force if the perp continues to resist arrest. Vimes thus gives him ample time and opportunity to surrender. Wolfgang doesn't. Vimes shoots him, having never expected him to take him up on it for a second. If he hadn't done it by the book, though, it would have been murder.

Tempting Fate: A subtle example appears in Wolfgang's chosen symbol of a wolf's head biting a mouthful of lightning bolts. Granted, they're not literal fireworks, but symbolically it rates as this trope.

Brought up several times, generally in regards to a Dwarfish axe which has been passed down through the family for generations: sometimes the head needed replacing, other times the shaft, still more times the eye or the bit, but it's still the same ancestral axe.

Played to the hilt in the book's climax, where no one's terribly upset that the conspiracy to influence the Dwarfish succession involved destroying the Scone of Stone and replacing it with a perfect replica: the Scone had already been replaced many times over the centuries, but it had always remained "the thing and the whole of the thing."

Third Line, Some Waiting: While many Discworld books are Two Lines, No Waiting or Four Lines, All Waiting, this one cuts to short scenes of Colon and his power trip, ensuing paranoia and inability to count to thirty as Acting Captain. And in doing so brings the much-needed funny to a primary plotline that is about as dark and serious as anything Pratchett has ever written.

Too Dumb to Fool: Vetinari's insinuating way of speaking, which is usually enough to terrify anyone talking to him into submission, flies completely over Colon's head, even as Vetinari gets increasingly unsubtle about his feelings about Colon's work. (Amusingly enough, Colon is one of the many people in Ankh-Morpork terrified of Vetinari using sarcasm on him, even as he fails to notice it happening.)

"Lord Vetinari paused. He found it difficult to talk to Frederick Colon. He dealt on a daily basis with people who treated conversation as a complex game, and with Colon he had to keep on adjusting his mind in case he overshot."

Trivial Title: Despite the enraged plummeting pachyderm on the cover of some editions, to say nothing of the title, the book is not actually about an elephant. Well, it is about an elephant, but a metaphorical, not literal, one. OK, OK, there is a literal elephant, but it's a legend of something that may or may not have happened millions of years ago. The titular Fifth Elephant lost its footing on Great A'tuin's shell in prehistory and collided with the Disc, breaking apart its Pangaea-type supercontinent and being responsible for Uberwald's fat reserves; and is also a Uberwaldian phrase meaning "something that is not what it seems".

Uncanny Valley: invoked In-universe — Vimes notes than Lady Margolotta is trying very hard to look like a harmless middle-aged housewife, but she's missed it by just enough to give quite a chilling effect. Of course, considering who we're talking about, this could be entirely deliberate.

Unfortunate Names: The town of Bonk. (This is funnier in British Englishnote "bonk" being a fairly harmless word for "have sex with") It cuts both ways, though: in the Uberwaldian language, "Morpork" means "an item of ladies' underwear" (Vimes wonders which item).

Also note Bonk is supposedly more strictly pronounced Beyonknote This is a reference to Slavic languages having phonemic palatalization, and this being consistently ignored in transcriptions into languages which don't; which is to say, most of them. In this case, the initial 'B' is palatalized, which inserts a 'y' sound between it and the next vowel. In Cyrillic, it would probably be spelled Бёнк, which could also be transliterated "Byonk". For a bit of (probably unintentional) Bilingual Bonus, the proper Russian translation of "bonk", трах or трахнуть, retains the British double-entendre nature of the word - it can mean either "hit someone over the head" or "have passionate sex with someone".

Unsettling Gender-Reveal: Not only Dee, but it's strongly hinted that the Low King is female as well. Or maybe not. S/he is a rather subtle old bastard.

Urine Trouble: Narrowly averted when Death, whom a fall-addled Gaspode has mistaken for a convenient tree, speaks up in protest. The poor dog nearly does himself an injury stopping himself from letting loose.

Vampires Are Sex Gods: Nicely subverted with Lady Margolotta, who is said to resemble an attractive, middle-aged housewife, and wears fuzzy pink sweaters with bat patterns.

Vetinari's uncharacteristic pauses of nostalgic longing seem to indicate a special something she had with him. Whatever she is now, she might have had a much greater "presence" back in Vetinari's younger days.

Also the Scone of Stone is a humorous reversal of the stone upon which Scottish monarchs were crowned (until the English stole it), the Stone of Scone (pronounced 'skoon' - they have it back, but are 'asked' to return it for the monarch's coronation, their monarch too of course, as it is a part of the ceremony). Not only is this a Shout-Out to the real, English coronation rituals, but a scone is a) an old word for altar, and b) a kind of pastry. And dwarfs do treat their baked goods very reverentially, and make them rock-hard... All that simply by reversing the word's order. But this is Pratchett we're talking about.

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy